The Superiority Burger Cookbook Has the Secret to the Best Mushrooms You'll Ever Eat

When planning new menu items at Superiority Burger, his studio apartment-sized vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan, chef Brooks Headley is primarily concerned with filling a paper boat. Here, the star-spangled paper receptacle—more commonly used elsewhere to serve hot dogs—holds crunchy lettuces dressed in vegan caesar dressing, creamy potato salad festooned with pretzel-y bread crumbs, and a burnt broccoli salad so burnt it occasionally tastes like already-smoked weed (but in a good way!). All of these complement the restaurant’s widely beloved namesake foodstuff, a small and squishy veggie burger that actually tastes good.

Lauren Lancaster

The boat is an essential part of Headley’s highly pragmatic ethos, and provides a constraint: any side dish needs to be ample enough to fill it, without costing more than ten dollars. So while Headley and his crew will buy best-in-show farmers market produce—on a recent Tuesday afternoon there was barely-tender broccolini that had been blanched in asparagus stock and tasted like a hundred vegetables in one—they fill it out with standard issue ingredients, like those white button mushrooms that lay waiting in styrofoam at your local budget supermarket. These get cooked to hell, or “hammered” in Headley’s words, and chopped up for use in sandwiches, salads, and burgers.

“We never ever use fancy mushrooms here,” Headley tells me as we squish ourselves into the back of the restaurant’s tiny kitchen with a large mixing bowl and two pounds of sliced criminis. “Part of that is because we use a lot of expensive ingredients here, like that broccolini from Campo Rosso farm, and we love it. But mushrooms just cook down to nothing. And part of what we need to do here is fill up the paper boat with stuff.” This is part of what makes Superiority Burger’s food so appealing: it is equal parts fussy and unfussy, executed with exacting standards but never obsessed with accessibility. It’s also, Headley explains, “secretly an Italian restaurant,” which means vegetables matter more than most things, and acid and spice and high-quality olive oil are constantly in rotation. Their gelato is the best in town.

Back to the mushrooms. Hammering, Headley tells me, is a bit of vocabulary that comes from fine dining: “It’s sort of an insult. Like [booming bro voice] “Bro, you hammered the fish!” In certain kitchens, like Del Posto—the Michelin-starred Italian restaurant where Headley was a pastry chef for years—it can be a good thing. This is the stance Headley maintains: taking something to its most-cooked, umami-est extreme is a virtue, a way to wring out as much flavor as you can.

In the Superiority Burger Cookbook, out this week, the recipe for hammered mushrooms falls in the back part of the book, surrounded by other “pantry staples” like brown rice and chickpea mayo. It’s the sort of hyper-useful dish you’d see in a cookbook and actually consider making at home: they’re a cheap and easy value-add, great on pasta or salads or pizza or eaten by ravenously with a fork, which is particularly hard not to do. Plus they’ll keep for weeks, since you’re sucking out all the water out of them.

The sliced mushrooms get tossed with salt and pepper and not-too-spicy Korean chili flakes, plus a quick glug of maple syrup and and just a little olive oil, which the mushrooms soak up almost immediately. “The maple syrup seems like a lot,” Headley tells me, “but we’re kind of going for a bacon-y thing, without calling it bacon.” (Another important Superiority Burger tenet: no fake meat, ever.) He spends almost five minutes making sure all his ingredients are well mixed, rotating his bowl constantly, a pastry kitchen technique that keeps you from mixing the same section while ignoring others.

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After that, the oven does its thing. All that’s required of the cook is checking in every five minutes or so to toss the mushrooms, making sure nothing is burning or sticking. At each checkpoint, they progress: they go from damp-looking to tan, then toasted, then they begin to caramelize deeply, a phase where “it almost smells like they’re burning, like something’s wrong,” Headley explains. The liquid released from the mushrooms releases and mixes with the maple syrup and olive oil, turning into its own dressing-slash-glaze.

Once they’re fully hammered, the mushrooms’ flavor is sweet and spicy and indeed bacon-y; one of Headley’s favorite ways to serve them is on a sorta-BLT in summer, with supermarket iceberg lettuce, the best sourdough bread he can find, perfect greenmarket tomatoes, and a house-made vegan mayonnaise. It’s peak Superiority Burger food: immediately endearing and wholly unfussy, the sort of thing to change the tune of anyone who has ever turned up their nose at a vegetarian restaurant. “It tastes like they’re covered in MSG [because] you’re utilizing all of that mushroom umami,” Headley says, picking at a few, nodding in acknowledgement that they turned out OK. ”They taste like barbecue lays potato chips.”

Toss the sliced mushrooms with the olive oil, maple syrup, and chile flakes in a medium bowl until they are evenly coated. Season with salt and pepper. Divide the mushrooms evenly between the two pans and spread into a single layer. Bake for 25 minutes. Toss the mushrooms with a spoon and return to the oven. Continue to cook the mushrooms, checking on them every 10 minutes or so and stirring every time you check. The mushrooms are done when they are a deep brown color (but not burned) and slightly dried out—dried at the edges and firm in the center. Remove from the oven and let cool a little before using.

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